First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The work of Raymond Williams has inspired radical intellectuals engaged in cultural politics and influenced many academic disciplines across the social sciences and humanities. This book examines the assumptions and limitations of Williams's political vision and commitments. In the spirit of appreciative criticism, this international collection of essays analyzes the neglected yet central tensions in Williams's thought. The contributors explore the implications of his work for a wide range of disciplines including education, cultural studies, history, literature, mass communication, and drama. The first section, "Culture is Ordinary" examines Williams's deconstruction of the false division between what he considers "common culture" and a "whole way of life". The second part, "Education From Below", explores Williams's conception of meaningful democratic participation in cultural institutions such as schools, taking into account the dilemmas that Leftist and feminist educators experience in the varied national and regional contexts of neo-conservatism. The final section is entitled "Culture's Others: Culture or Cultural Imperialism".

The clash between Britain and Ireland--and between Catholics and Protestants within Ireland--is among the oldest and most enduring nationalist, ethnic, and religious conflicts in the modern world, rooted in the colonization of Ireland by English and Scottish Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Through fifty-six original sources, many of which have never been reprinted, this volume traces the origins and development of the conflict during the years of the legislative union between Britain and Ireland--years shaped by the rise of, and British and Irish Unionist responses to, Irish nationalism. Dworkin's Introduction provides both a history of the conflict and a discussion of its causes; headnotes and footnotes set each selection in historical, political, and cultural context, and identify those terms and names that may be unfamiliar to modern readers. A map, a glossary, a chronology of events, and a select bibliography are included, as are an index and several contemporary illustrations.

In this intellectual history of British cultural Marxism, Dennis Dworkin explores one of the most influential bodies of contemporary thought. Tracing its development from beginnings in postwar Britain, through its various transformations in the 1960s and 1970s, to the emergence of British cultural studies at Birmingham, and up to the advent of Thatcherism, Dworkin shows this history to be one of a coherent intellectual tradition, a tradition that represents an implicit and explicit theoretical effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar British Left. Limited to neither a single discipline nor a particular intellectual figure, this book comprehensively views British cultural Marxism in terms of the dialogue between historians and the originators of cultural studies and in its relationship to the new left and feminist movements. From the contributions of Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Sheila Rowbotham, Catherine Hall, and E. P. Thompson to those of Perry Anderson, Barbara Taylor, Raymond Williams, Dick Hebdige, and Stuart Hall, Dworkin examines the debates over issues of culture and society, structure and agency, experience and ideology, and theory and practice. The rise, demise, and reorganization of journals such as The Reasoner, The New Reasoner, Universities and Left Review, New Left Review, Past and Present, are also part of the history told in this volume. In every instance, the focus of Dworkin's attention is the intellectual work seen in its political context. Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain captures the excitement and commitment that more than one generation of historians, literary critics, art historians, philosophers, and cultural theorists have felt about an unorthodox and critical tradition of Marxist theory.